ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a survey on how Swiss historiography and collective memory of the Second World War have been challenged and evolved in the decades following the war, focusing particularly on the country’s restrictive wartime refugee policy and the work of (and inspired by) the Bergier commission (1996–2002). It shows how the traditional memory discourse praising the country’s ‘armed neutrality’ – i.e. the idea that Switzerland survived the Second World War unscathed because of its neutrality and its army – remains widely shared although, spurred in particular by the findings of the Bergier commission, it has increasingly been challenged by more critical and better informed accounts that recognise the complexity of the international situation in which the country found itself between 1939 and 1945.
